jQuery 1.8 Beta 2 Released

It’s been a crazy few weeks around jQuery Central, what with the release of Beta 1 and the jQuery Conference in San Francisco following that. Fear not! Between all the travel, conferences, meetings, and blog posts about the future of jQuery, we’ve actually managed to write some more code. As proof, here is jQuery 1.8 Beta 2:

This is the critical section in the program where we call on you, the jQuery community, to help us bring this one home. Use Beta 2 with old browsers, new browsers, red browsers and blue browsers. (That’s IE6, Chrome Canary, Opera, and Internet Explorer, respectively.) Test this file with all your code, please test it well in every mode. Did something break in Beta 2? Please tell us now before we’re through!

With assistance from those of you who tested Beta 1, we found a few bugs and squashed them. We can’t emphasize enough how important it is for us to get feedback from you as you test with these beta versions. We don’t like releasing final versions that cause problems when you drop them into your web pages, and the way to prevent that is to test with the beta and let us know about problems in advance.

NOTE: This release required coordination with jQuery UI to fix a few problems. For that reason, pages using jQuery UI will need to include the latest UI master version to test against jQuery 1.8b2. You can get it here: http://code.jquery.com/ui/jquery-ui-git.js. There will be a maintenance release of jQuery UI 1.8 that includes jQuery core 1.8 support, but users are encouraged to update to jQuery UI 1.9 when it is released.

If you find a problem, please try to reduce it to a simple test case. jsFiddle is our preferred way to get test cases, since it allows us to tweak the test case, diagnose the problem, and explore solutions. (Select jQuery (edge) for the framework, which is the latest code.) With test case in hand, head over to the bug tracker and let us know what happened. Thanks!

In addition to bug fixes reported in Beta 1, this new beta also has a significant rewrite of the Sizzle engine for even better performance. It fixes a big pile of bugs related to IE 6, 7, and 8 and makes those browsers more consistent to use. Perfection with oldIE will always be an elusive thing, but we’re still trying to make your development life as easy as possible no matter the browser.

If you build your own custom versions as described in the README file on Github, you now have the option of leaving out some of the deprecated functionality that will be removed in future versions. We’ll be adding to this file as we isolate additional deprecated functionality.